Blog 6: A Study in Red (draft)

A Study in Red

Personal Protective Equipment for COVID-19 frontliners by fashion designer Puey Quiñones

           When I think about her, I feel as if I’m picking at a scar that hasn’t healed, even if barely visible on the outside. Covered up, hidden, and veiled in disinterest, the wound is dormant unless prodded or picked at or accidentally palpated. Stimulated, it comes alive, spilling out reddish hues all over this reminiscent mood. Flashes of those crimson moments– a bouquet of McDonald’s French fries, the roller coasters at Six Flags, watching Death Cab live at the Red Rocks Casino after 3 hours on a road trip– injected into my thoughts, sweet and sanguinous. But then all at once this glimpse evaporated, leaving behind scents of saccharine copper. Those shades that tinted my blood-shot eyes, florid; the color of your fiery voice, now a ghostly burgundy; and your carnelian figure, slipped into a scarlet silhouette.

I can count each of these cardinal contours that swirl around this cinnabar heart, crystallized like a stubborn ruby or bruised like a cherry chestnut, because the lens of love oh so lacquered in russet, reveals its spectrum of passion ranging from the deepest wavelengths of the chocolate cosmos to the brightest of carmine celebrations. And as time sneaks on, I’ve learned to contrast more than just the fruity pleasures of nostalgia from the bitter pigments of bereavement and maroon resentment. I could tell the difference in the subtleties of sorrow that slumber within. 

          The pain is like grabbing a rose by its stem, the fire red pang from the thorns that arises instead of smelling the savory scent of the roses; a sudden, unexpected and unwanted attention. Or the hurt is nothing at all; the sparseness of a home once lived in– a ruins of a once imperial castle. Heartbreak is thus a phantom limb of some sort. It is a fallen redwood tree in the clearing of a forest. My day to day life usually involves being in the thicket, so to speak, of walking in the shade of the woodland, caught up in the sound of leaves rustling, twigs snapping and birds singing– all shrouded in a mist of indifference.

But once in a while, I stumble upon that open patch of unpatched land and can see the stars above, gazing at me and the fallen redwood tree. The giant one in the horizon, casting its red dawn on the glade, engulfs me in remembrance. I’m dyed with madder and blushing pink, saturated with those shades of sadness and overwhelmed by its rainbow of regret. Did I not tend to our garden with a green thumb? Did you forget to pull out the weeds? Did we forget to water our redwood tree?

Every time this happens, I retreat back into the bushes, more and more knowledgeable of the intricacies of that sacred hollow log, but also less and less willing to lie exposed and naked to the sky’s garnet gaze. I miss the trees for the forest, willingly clothed in ambivalence. So I wander aimlessly as the days creep by, until I inevitably lose my bearings, knowing that I’ll eventually trip once more into that prickly emptiness of blinding light and its complex wavelengths that I’ll soon be able to more fully distinguish. I get more and more used to this cycle of sharpness and numbness, becoming more acutely aware of these body pains: referred pain from an aching heart living in the remains of love. And that’s okay, that is the history of this place I come to know as my body. It is the context for which I put my palms together to pray.